Carole Geithner Discusses Her First Novel, “If Only”

Carole Geithner was 25 years old when her mother died of cancer. As would be expected, the loss was
a startling and formative episode. “I experienced the world stopping. I felt very
much alone,” she says. It influenced her to choose a path of social work and counseling
bereaved school-age children, experiences she explores in her first novel,
If Only, which she describes as a “coming-of-age novel about
a girl who lost her mother in her eighth-grade year.” (Read Drew Bratcher’s review
of the book.)

Geithner, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavior sciences at George
Washington University, was the guest of honor Thursday at a luncheon in Wesley Heights
hosted by
Ginny Grenham and other members of the Founding Friends of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Her husband
is Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner.

Recalling the period after her mother’s death, she says it was “an awkward dance of
‘Do I want to talk about it or not?’” When she did bring up the subject, people reacted
by “leaning in or leaning out.” She saw similar situations with the middle school
children she worked with at a bereavement center in Westchester, New York. “They all
had in common the death of a parent or the death of a sibling,” she says. “They experienced
a sense of isolation.”

What Geithner found in her bereavement support group was that books helped a lot.
“But for this teenage group, there were not a lot of books that get into the grief
experience. I decided there was a need, and I had the time. I drew on the experience
of working with all these children.” She also says, “I wanted to write a book for
kids who can’t get to a support group.” She recommends the book for teenagers especially,
but also their “friends, teachers, neighbors, even members of their own family, because
they don’t know what to bring up and when.”

Geithner knows it is a tough subject, but she didn’t let that dissuade her. “We can
come up with 20 books that are about life, but this is a book about death.” Sadly,
she says, the subject is taboo. “We don’t want death to be part of everyday life.”